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Comment by yayr | Hacker News Reader

it is something different if your screen is only a few square centimeters or if you are in a virtual environment. At least I do not agree to your point of view. For example running something like MS Flight Sim with decent realistic visuals is absolutely impossible, forget any other sims that require high quality characters, nature or anything else with a high polygon count or AI rendering

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The far bigger problem for VR is simply crispness of text and objects at a distance. High poly counts are relatively unimportant, there's a new Zelda game out with graphics that wouldn't have been amazing ten years ago doing pretty well that would probably run just fine on a quest.

You need a PPD of about 35 - 40 for reading comfortably. 50 is retina quality.

Even with the Meta Quest Pro, it only gets to about 24. The same goes for the HP reverb g2. For $1999, the Varjo Aero PCVR headset comes at 35 PPD, but at that price it doesn’t include the $3000 -$4000 PC to run it or the $600 base stations and controllers. It’s also wired to the PC

At $3000, i am guessing that the Apple headset will be 35 or higher PPD

> 50 is retina quality.

Something must be off here. My 4k 40″ screen at 30 inches distance gives 70 ppd. It works well for reading, but I don't think it fits "retina quality". Retina would be above 100.

BTW, half of that (35ppd) would be an uncomfortable 1080p on 40″. Which makes Quest Pro even worse.

The only thing I think might make it better is that unlike on static screens head motion could add a nice smoothing effect to the picture, which might potentially lower the required PPD.

The original Game Boy did sell quite well despite low resolution and ghosting. There were other devices with better screens and higher price. People chose the lower price and the worse screen. Is this also plausible for VR? The success of the Quest suggests: yes.

but at the time the market was different and the product at the time was an improvement over single purpose game toys by allowing changing games. Totally different story. Of course there is a low price market for lower resolution and compute... But there is a reason that retina displays on all device types are a thing too, usually at higher price points, at least initially. And economies of scale, manufacturing hardware depreciation etc. will bring these devices also to lower price points sooner or later.

Microsoft Flight Simulator is 40 years old by now. Despite massive improvements in computer graphics, it still seems to essentially be the niche product it always was. Which is consistent with the "graphics don't matter much" theory.

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